Birka and Hovgården
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. Counts of visitors and wishes will appear once enough people use the app.
How it came to be
Birka was founded around 750 as a trading port on the island of Björkö in Lake Mälaren and flourished for more than 200 years. On the neighbouring island of Adelsö, Hovgården was the royal estate from which Birka was governed. At its height about 700 people lived in the town, and more than 3,000 graves survive on the island.
In 829, after Swedish envoys asked for missionaries, the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious sent the monk Ansgar, who was received at Birka by King Björn. In 831 the first Christian congregation in Sweden was founded there. The Life of Ansgar, written around 865 by his pupil Rimbert, gives the first known description of Birka.
Birka was abandoned in the later 10th century, around the time Sigtuna, some 35 km to the north-east, took its place as the region's trading centre. The royal estate at Hovgården lived on: a runestone carved for the king was raised there around 1070, and in the 13th century a king built a brick palace, Alsnö hus. Hjalmar Stolpe excavated Björkö over some twenty years in the late 19th century, and the two sites were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1993.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).